I was looking at the fix that is needed here. The simple fix is easy, but in a broader context why does OpenVpms utilize a seperate archetype for fax numbers, the mobile archetype has been depreciated in favour of using a PURPOSE for mobiles.

Why not depreciate contact.fax in favour of adding a purpose to contact.phone enabling a phone to have a purpose as a fax.

My reasons.

  1. Many people who still use fax's use it on a shared line, even Telstra still is pushing the faxstream network over a 2nd line (ie the fax uses a shared line with the phone, and just gives a different ring that fax machines can detect and answer selectively)

2. A fax is a phone number there is no difference.

3. It is far easier to add 1 number with 4 purposes and manage that data than to manage seperate contact archetypes

4. Existing formating code for phone number would apply to fax's  both now and in future changes.

In the current scope, a customer could potentially have a mobile for work and home, we are allowed to assign multiple purpose's to a contact.phone, however....partyRules.GetContact function only allows for 1 defined purpose to be searchable.  This means that utilizing a contact.phone with purpose's defines as FAX AND BILLING , MAY not be easily returnable when you consider there is also the possibility of having a number with  BILLING as a  purpose.  This could be corrected by adding seperate purpose's for FAX-Billing, FAX-other etc etc.

I noticed that the only time this seems to be used in current code is in Ordermapperimpl.java where a search for any purpose defined as BILLING is conducted in the function